Tag: Music

A few months ago after going to a family members wedding and talking with the DJ and asking him a few questions I decided that I would give DJing a try. So I played with some open source software out there called MIXX and found that it was fun to do. I also have done sound work with my Dad since I was in middle school, there has been some time though that I have done none but I still know what I’m doing with sound equipment. I also have some equipment from my podcast setup.

I looked around for what I would need, and since I didn’t have much money to spend on stuff I got a basic Hercules DJ Console MK4, Harbringer 15″ powered speakers, Bringer Eurorack mixer package. Console was didn’t come in the package, and it came with stands, cables, and some cheap mics.

On the mics though I did get a email after saying they would give me a $50 credit for select items, but it didn’t work and when I talked with them on the phone they just asked me what I wanted and I got a Shure SM48 for free.

Anyways I played with my equipment and acquired more music, and a guy from work’s daughter was getting married so I was testing my speakers in the gym at work and I offered to do the wedding for free so I could get experience.

Things went good, learned a lot such as even though you talk with the people you are playing for, they may have other plans so you may need to get more information on what songs are if they give you a disk of things they like. I wasn’t informed of what some of the songs were for and played them but later they wanted them for dances that the bride and maids were doing oops. Also found out that I had my speakers up too high and the patio covering was blocking the sound to the people in the back. It may have also been that I was trying to keep the volume to a point that if you were in the back it wouldn’t be all that loud but on the patio were people were dancing I think it was loud enough.

So Friday I am going to do the music for my cousin’s second local wedding reception, not sure what I will play but have some music that will be good for the audience. They said they didn’t want to dance so not sure how good some of the songs will be that normally get danced too. I have just spend a few hours going though music to get an idea of what I have again since it’s been a few months since I did the first wedding.

The more I learn and get experience it should get more fun to do, just need to get more people to pay me to do things for them and more then once every three months.

I was going through music for DJ gigs and though of Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley also know as Rick Rolled and that video of the song on Youtube.com has over 34 million views! That’s crazy that so many people have ended up watching that video because they wanted to or by getting Rick Rolled. Any ways here it is just to get you in the mood.

Just got home from getting my car fix and I found a nice email waiting for me from Google saying that I have been invited to their music beta. They announced the service less than a month ago at the Google IO conference, and I signed up to be added when they had more space for people. I also have the new music app on my Nexus One and it’s kind of nice but I don’t listen to music I have on my phone all that much.

I did try out the Amazon Cloud Player a week or so ago and it was kind of cool to just have the app on my phone and be playing the songs I got without adding them to my phone. Before that I was trying a server app combo that worked ok but it was running all the time on my computer and wanted me to donate to keep it working after a month, it was called Subsonic and works the same why that both Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player do.

So far I just clicked the link in the email (I know you shouldn’t click email links but I trust and saw who it was from,) on the page it had me accept some terms and conditions (that I didn’t read much of) and then asked if I wanted some free music, I took everything just to see what there was nothing all that amazing but whatever. Then it asked to download the Music Manager and then skip on to the player.

The Music Manager was a web installer like the Chrome installer, after a user email and password it was setup very fast. On first load it asks if you want to import music from iTunes, Windows Media, My Music, or a Other folder. Because I don’t have iTunes installed and wont install it because its garbage and none of my music is in one place I did Other folders and added a few folders to the program. It then looked at the files and after the scanning of over 1,000 files it asked if I want to upload my files. It changes over to a new window showing progress and from there you can add folders and what not.

It did have an error uploading a file and it was shown in a separate window, I wouldn’t be surprised of an error because some of my music has come from years of collecting, computer wipes, and different sources. Back on the website I was seeing new songs show up and are organized kind of nice.

So far it plays good on a computer, pages load fast and the music streams like it was playing right on the computer. As for the Android app it took a second to load up the listing in the app after setting up the account to use. When you would play a track that was not cashed to the phone a few second later it would start playing over WIFI and you can see a tinted progress bar where it shows the play progress. But it all plays very nice ill have to see how 3G works some other time.

I think that Google has it working the best, but it is almost the same thing as Amazon, one difference is that Google counts the number of tracks and Amazon counts gigabytes giving you 5GB free on Amazon and 20GB if you buy an album. Where Google gives you 20,000 tracks at this point, who knows what they will do, if it’s like Picasa they will give a usable amount then sell you a yearly amount for a good price.

If you go over to http://music.google.com it looks like they are opening it up to anyone right now for there “free for a limited time” so go check it out. Below is a few screen shots of the service. Have fun with this, it might just get me to listen to more music or ill just stick with http://di.fm 😀